


Sick Tricks and Forklifts, or: HR Would Like a Word

by nowavailableinthesky



Category: Warrior Nun (TV)
Genre: F/F, Factory AU, Multi, let's see how much random knowledge we can cram in this baby
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-09
Updated: 2020-09-09
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:22:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26373406
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nowavailableinthesky/pseuds/nowavailableinthesky
Summary: Listen. C'mon, now. Sometimes a girl in possession of a forklift's just gotta put the pedal to the metal, you know? Let that baby rip, go the full fifteen miles an hour. Beautiful. Look at 'er go!(For some reason, this is generally frowned upon. Whatever. Last one to Storeroom's buying from the vending machine for a week!)aka, factory au
Relationships: Sister Beatrice/Ava Silva, Sister Lilith/Shotgun Mary (Warrior Nun)
Comments: 21
Kudos: 57





	Sick Tricks and Forklifts, or: HR Would Like a Word

**Author's Note:**

> hi welcome to my oddly specific au

FRIDAY, APRIL 5, 2019

“So I just sign here?”

“Yes.”

“Right here? Just sign?”

“Yes.”

“And that’s it, all I have to do is sign?”

“Literally, yes.”

“All right, all right, cool. And signing…now…”

“Thank you, Miss Silva. We’ll process your paperwork right away. Have a great day.”

* * *

MONDAY, APRIL 8, 2019

The thing is, the factory is really, really big. (Picture a Walmart. Picture two Walmarts. Now, add a baseball field onto that. You’re not quite there, but that’s the ballpark.) And it’s _so_ flat. Like obviously, you’re not going to find escalators or—god forbid—elevators meant for human beings in a factory, just rows and rows of shelves and reconfigurable workspaces in an ever-evolving labyrinthine maze. Bright lights in steel girders high above that keep the whole place fuckin’ lit 24/7. It’s kind of creepy, actually, how whenever Ava leaves and pushes the chirp-chirp button for her funky lil’ 2002 Dodge Neon with the fuzzy orange seat cover the factory’s still lit up behind her and third shift’s already, like, twenty minutes into being either a) lazy fucks or b) stupid overachievers.

Which is really annoying when she’s stuck scraping ice and snow off her car at 11:23 PM on a Friday night. Like, god. Would it kill her to have a normal twenty-something-year-old life? Party, get high, whatever the cool kids are doing? But _no_ , it’s earn money this, pay your rent that. (Someday she might even be able to afford the nice ramen.)

But that’s another story, and freezing her incredibly beautiful ass off in sub-zero temperatures is coincidentally also another story. This right now is aisle 23, shelf 48, item O-BRM-50-XR, where medium O-rings in tidy, heat-sealed packages of fifty _should_ be. (Spoiler: They’re not there.)

“Lilith!” Ava hollers on the off chance that the shift’s Storeroom manager is within earshot—not that Lilith would answer if she were in earshot. 

Nothing. 

Ava expertly maneuvers the standing forklift in reverse out of the aisle, keeping an eye on her rearview mirror to make sure no idiots are casually standing behind her. She whistles a little tune as she goes. Aisle 24, aisle 25. There’s only so many places Lilith can hide, she has to be on call when shipments come in or when parts for orders are short. The Electronics department alone is a pain in Lilith’s ass (and Ava’s by extension) due to the rate at which they go through parts. The fault’s never with them, of course. (The Quality Assurance department would beg to differ.) The parts just…conveniently don’t work, suddenly, I don’t know.

Aisle 26, shelf 23. _Aha_. There she is.

“Lilith! Light of my life and the life beyond! I come bearing sad news.”

“Of course you do.”

“We’re out of the medium BRM O-rings. Vince says he needs some for his new temp, stat.”

“Can’t they wait?” Lilith looks irritated and honestly, it’s valid. The temp in Vince’s department hasn’t learned the second most valuable lesson of factory work. First is you gotta hit your target numbers. It’s kinda the point of working here. Second is don’t get too far ahead—you’ll leave yourself twiddling your thumbs, looking for work to do. (Oh, also safety. Safety’s a key lesson there somewhere.)

Ava shrugs. She really doesn’t care. It’s kinda funny watching the temp frantically try to look ‘busy' anytime someone passes by his station in Tampo, where straps and other fancy shit gets added to the hard hats. Those fifteen or so square feet must the cleanest in the factory ‘cause he’s swept them so often.

“I said you’d take a look for him.”

“Of course you did. Has he submitted the proper order form?”

“Nope.”

“Of course he hasn’t.” Lilith frowns at her clipboard, looks up at a laminated label taped to a shelf far above her. These shelves—built of metal slats painted orange—tower over both her and Ava. Pallets stacked on pallets stacked on pallets. The lower shelves are where smaller items are kept, boxes cut open so Ava and the others can take out the right count when order forms from various departments come in. Lilith scribbles something on her clipboard and moves down the aisle.

Ava, meanwhile, parks the standing forklift just inside the aisle—twisting the key that turns it off—and hops down to join Lilith. They’ve known each other for long enough now that the manager’s eye only barely twitches.

“Got any marching orders for me in the meantime, O eternal delight?"

“Let me check,” Lilith says, and unclips the scanner from her belt. The scanner's basically a fancy calculator. (Looks like one, too.) It’s what Stockroom folks use to scan new shipments into the system, noting which parts are out of stock and what orders are where in the whole ‘yes we’ll get you what you asked for _god_ would you calm down for a minute’ process. “Three boxes of labels for Air, yet another hundred rubber covers for Electronics, and—ah. An order’s in for the Hat Lab,” she says. Lilith’s never exactly innocent-looking (it’s those cheekbones, damn) but the way she’s staring at the scanner hard enough to burn a hole in it just _screams_ forced casual. She clips it back to her belt. “I suggest you handle this one."

“Oh, and why can’t you get this order, hmm? I know you were the one who put it in last week.” Ava leans back in order to properly shoot an indignant look at Lilith. "Mary was mad, you worked Storeroom manager magic, pulled some strings and got those size small MinerHat straps moved up on the priority shipping list despite PlasTec insisting they couldn’t be shipped out for another week?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Of course you don’t.” Lilith pretends to check her clipboard. (Ava knows she’s already been over that part of the form, her fancy handwriting's all over it. Coward.)

“C’mon, Lilith,” she says. “You _just_ said I gotta go to Air, and then to Electronics, and we all know Electronics are huge babies who can’t wait. Please? Just do Hat Lab for me?"

“Mmm, can’t, the forklift’s charging.”

Ava glances at the charging station against the back wall, where a single seated forklift is at rest. The other forklifts are out on the floor, manned by Sandy and Yosef. “You mean the lift I plugged in three hours ago?” she says.

“Yes.”

“The one that only takes an hour, max, to charge to full capacity?”

“That one, yes.”

“Okay, just making sure we’re absolutely clear.”

“I live to clarify, Ava.” Lilith tucks the clipboard under her arm and looks Ava dead in the eye. (She gulps.) “Just do what I’m telling you to do, so I don’t have to do what I’m telling you to do.”

“Sure thing, boss.”

“Don’t call me boss.”

“Sure thing, light of my life.”

“Don’t— _ugh_."

So let’s break all this down:

You wake up at 10am most days. Rise and fuckin’ shine, baby. Make yourself some eggs, bitch at your parents a little, give your little brother a noogie (if it’s not the school year in which case sorry, have fun seeing him two days a week). Futz around online for an hour or two. Think about doing that thing you told yourself you really wanted to do, that thing that would give your life some purpose. Futz around on Facebook instead. (Ooh, look, Jenny just got engaged. Will got a job in Boston. Cool stuff, cool stuff. Go ahead and make a passive-aggressive status update, but like, add some heart emojis. Make it soft. )

Then you tug on a pair of neon green Timberland steel-toed shoes (that’s _fashion_ , baby) and your second-most-worn-down pair of jeans. No visible knees in the factory, please (something something, loose cloth is a safety hazard, ugh). It’s a bitch in the summer months. You can feel yourself sweating through the denim already. Throw on the t-shirt you got from Taylor Swift’s ’Speak Now tour when you were twelve—yes, it still fits, shut up. 

Okay, get in your car now. (Maybe stop and fill up the gas, whoops.) Show up at the factory ten minutes later, clock in, clock out, and get some fast food on the way home. Then scroll on your phone in the dim of your bedroom after midnight until your eyeballs feel like fuzzy static and you finally fall asleep. 

...That’s about it, yeah. Other than that you’re good as long as you follow the rules.

_Rule one:_ Always wear your protective eyeglasses. (Janice in first shift Electronics is a snitch and she will tell on you.) _Rule two:_ Show up early, leave exactly on time. Timecard system knows all and if you’re late at the start of the shift, you’ll be waiting in line forever to scan your employee ID and then you’ll clock in late and have to stay longer to make up the difference. _Rule three:_ You don’t know rule three, you tuned out during the orientation video.

Mostly all you need to know is that the long days stretch out before you and it’s like a rubber band treadmill stretched thin, you’re just the poor sap running on the surface of it and waiting for all this boredom and fucking stagnation to snap back and hit you in the fucking face. You know?

Anyway. Ava'd graduated somewhere _not_ the top of her high school class and college was never her thing, okay, you can’t fold cards if you never had ‘em in the first place. (Or something.) So she went to the local temp agency and got a factory job ten minutes from her house. It was something. (It was supposed to be something temporary.)

They had her in Kits first, putting together packets of extra pieces for the company’s products and burning herself on the plastic heat seal machine. She got fast. It’s mindless. The most fun you can have in a gig like this is racing against yourself and the clock, seeing how fast you can put things together. Ava didn’t exactly _mean_ to be efficient. It was an accident, honest to god.

Anyway. One day in between lectures her boss told her to apply to that opening in Soldering and her coworkers wouldn’t stop bugging her about it, so she applied. When she went in for the interview the guy behind the beat-up desk asked her if she was motivated.

“Uh, I mean. I guess so. I like a paycheck as much as the next person?”

“Motivated to do your job, Miss Silva.”

“Uh, yeah! Sure. I’m plenty motivated. Last week I bet Juan a brownie that I wouldn’t finish the hose kits by 9pm. It was delicious."

“We’ll be talking to you in the near future, Miss Silva. Thank you for your time.”

So she landed in Soldering (burned herself some more but got to play with wicked-looking molten metal), got promoted to Electronics for a hot minute when they were short a person during Sonia’s maternity leave, then ended up in Storeroom. 

Storeroom's the lifeblood of the factory. (Don’t believe the Logistics people when they tell you otherwise.) And Ava, she's like blood cells or some shit, carrying parts to and from different areas of the factory. That’s the boring way of saying what she does now, of course. Okay, here’s the cool way: She’s the motherfucking _water spider_ , baby!

Yeah, she laughed when they told her the job title. It’d been during her first temp assignment, long before Soldering, long before her Storeroom days—Ernie in Kits had pointed at the light-on-a-pole by the shipping pallets and told her to put the finished products there once they’d been double-checked, sealed, boxed, taped, the whole shebang.

“When we got a full pallet, you hit this button. Turns the light on, light summons the water spider,” he'd said.

“The what,” Ava'd said.

“The water spider.”

“ _What_.”

"Doug or Sandy or someone’ll come with a forklift from Storeroom, pick up the pallets, and take ‘em to Shipping. If we're low on parts, you got any orders for Storeroom or something, you can give ‘em to ‘em, too. They’ll pass it along and bring back supplies when there’s time."

Every time she’d pushed the button after that she’d giggle a little but otherwise didn’t think much about the water spiders. Like, she talked to them, of course. She wasn’t rude. (She’d been on the verge of starting a weekly D&D campaign with Doug before he and his girlfriend and his cousin decided to move to New Jersey, of all places.) Otherwise she'd done her thing and watched the clock and let the motion of her hands become muscle memory, absentmindedly tweaking the assembly process for each order, shaving seconds here and there just to be done with it. (Hah, you're never ever done.)

Sometimes now, swinging the lift around the corner to Kits (Ernie retired last year and some lady named Cheryl works his shift now), Ava thinks she can see the ghost of herself that fall—too-thin, arms always sore, hair tucked under a loose beanie. Thinks, too, that she can see—like a cloud of black and jagged scribbling static around her past self’s head—a feeling, that feeling, that blooms and fades and that has never really ever seemed to leave.

Ava’s just finished helping Mary cart boxes of size small MinerHat straps (“Took long enough to arrive! The way Lilith was acting, like, ‘oh, they’re backordered, we can’t get any until next week,' you’d think I was asking her to give me her left kidney.” Ava, wisely, keeps her mouth shut) into the Hat Lab when it happens. What ‘it’? Oh, nothing major, just the best damn moment of her life.

She’s leaned against the counter as Mary fills out a form confirming the parts have been delivered when the double doors to the lab swing open and in walks a woman Ava has never seen before, whom she immediately decides is the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. Her proof? Uh, _everything_. 

The woman’s small smile, for one. Her light brown eyes, for another. The way her bobbed haircut so perfectly frames her face, which is— _wow_ , it’s a nice face. Just…wow. And her cream turtleneck! And the way she carefully cradles her clipboard! Lifts a hand and gracefully brushes her bangs to the side! (Wait, when did Ava become a fucking poet?)

Anyway, confirmed: definitely the Most Beautiful Woman in the World. Someday, just someday! Ava might even learn her name.

“Hey, Beatrice,” says Mary. 

What?

“You here to mingle with the peasantry? Survey the QA kingdom?" says Mary.

_What_.

The Most Beautiful Woman in the World, who is apparently named Beatrice, laughs. (It is the most beautiful laugh in the world.) “Just getting familiar with everything! It’s all new to me. I do have a question about the issues you were having with the latest MinerHat impact tests, when you get a moment? It can wait, if you’re busy!”

“Nah, it’s all good.” Mary waves a hand, shakes off the concern. “Just filling this out for Storeroom, I can be with you in a sec. Why don’t y’all get to know each other in the meantime?"

Then Beatrice (what a great name, wow) turns to Ava. Eye contact and everything, the whole nine yards of human interaction. “Hello! Pardon the interruption, I’m so sorry. I’m Beatrice, I started as the new engineer in Quality Assurance yesterday. And you are?”

Who is…That’s a good question. Who is _Ava_? 

(Ava, for one, has no fucking clue.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this chapter brought to you by me (and the bug who chilled on my ceiling out of reach for a solid 24 hours)
> 
> title is from Changes by Stars. current plan is to alternate between this and “intrinsically (you knew me).” see y’all next chapter! —bean


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